S1-04. The importance of fluency instruction: Tim Rasinski

Susan and Tim Rasinski, author of The Megabook of Fluency: Strategies and Texts to Engage All Readers, discuss his work at the reading clinic at Kent State University, the aspects of good fluency instruction, what constitutes fluency, and how reading speed is correlated to word recognition and automaticity. He stresses the importance of fluency and finding ways to be artful while teaching reading.

Quotes:

“Fluency is the bridge and we can’t ignore it.”

“Speed is the consequence of automaticity–automaticity is not the consequence of speed.”

Resources:

The Megabook of Fluency: Strategies and Texts to Engage All Readers by Tim Rasinski

Why Reading Should be Hot! by Tim Rasinski

Email: trasinsk@kent.edu

Website with articles and blog: timrasinski.com

Twitter: @trasinski1

Kent State Reading Clinic

Additional resources:

Fluency: The Neglected Reading Goal by Richard Allington

After Decoding: What? by Carol Chomsky

The Method of Repeated Readings by Dr. S. Jay Samuels

Jean Chall's Stages of Reading Development

Tim Shanahan interview on The Science of Reading

Want to discuss the episode? Join our Facebook group Science of Reading: The Community.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:40

What if a change in classroom practice could lead to change in reading outcomes? What should reading instruction include to ensure all students have the opportunity to succeed? What does cognitive science tell us about learning to read? And why aren't those learnings applied in our classrooms? Welcome to Science of Reading the podcast. I'm your host, Susan Lambert from Amplify Education. Join us every two weeks as we talk with Science of Reading experts to explore what it takes to transform our classrooms and develop confident and capable readers. On today's episode, we move from general conversations about the science of reading into more specifics of one aspect of reading instruction. Joining me is Dr. Tim Rosinski, a noted expert from Kent State University. We talk about the importance and often neglected topic of fluency. Hi, Tim. Thank you so much for joining us today.

SPEAKER_00 1:40

Hi, Susan.

SPEAKER_01 1:41

So you are an award-winning author. You're really an expert on this topic of fluency, but what I like to do before we dig into it is understand your story. How did you get to this place and how did you get interested in fluency?

SPEAKER_00 1:56

Sure. I have an I think a rather interesting story to tell. It was back in the mid-1970s. I had gotten out of service and I used the GI Bill to become a teacher. This is in uh near Omaha, Nebraska, and started as a classroom teacher, middle school, elementary school, but eventually I developed an interest in kids who were having difficulty in reading. I was working on my master's degree uh in uh in reading. And um, well, it just so happened that I'm working with these kids, and I thought I was doing everything I was supposed to do, you know, according to the book back then. But many of these children were not making much progress in their reading. I was working on phonics and vocabulary and comprehension, but they seem to be flatlining. You know, it was disappointing. I thought I knew something, and here I am, just uh not making much progress at all. Well, fortunately for me, I was, as I said, working on my master's, and uh there were some articles that were just beginning to appear about reading fluency in our professional journals, and the professors had us reading them. One of them was called Fluency the Neglected Goal, the reading program by uh uh Dick Allington. Uh, but actually, a couple that preceded that was one by Carol Chomsky called After Decoding, then what? She was working, much like me, with kids who are having difficulty working on decoding with them and they still weren't making any progress. And her answer was fluency, work on fluency with the kids. And then there was Dr. Jay Samuels had a great piece called The Method of Repeated Readings, where he said, for some kids, it's not enough for them to read a text once, but like any skill, sometimes you have to practice it. So he talked about having kids read a text two, three, four times. And what he found was that not only did they improve on that text that they practiced, but there was a carryover. There were improvements to new things they hadn't seen before. Uh, and so I decided to try some of these methods out with the kids I was working with. And lo and behold, uh, they started to make progress. And in some cases, it was really quite breathtaking to see the progress they were making. Not only were that was their reading improving, but their confidence in themselves, their joy in reading, uh, simply by crossing, crossing that threshold into more proficient reading and fluency seemed to be the answer there. So that's what got me started. And then I, you know, went out for my uh doctorate degree at Ohio State and found uh a professor, Jerry Zutel, who had a similar interest. And so the two of us uh uh worked together and uh well the rest is history 40-some years later.

SPEAKER_01 4:29

Yeah, um, I remember I was a classroom teacher not 40-some years ago, but a lot of years ago, and the first time I came across your research was at a professional development that you hosted in Rochester, Minnesota. So that's a long time ago.

SPEAKER_00 4:45

I remember it though. It was a nice uh it was a nice uh uh uh part of the country to be in at the time.

SPEAKER_01 4:50

Yeah, and fluency, I mean, the fluency is not a big topic, but you still are doing research in this area of fluency, trying to push this movement forward. Tell us a little bit about the work you're doing there at the reading clinic at Kent State.

SPEAKER_00 5:05

Sure. Uh yeah, I I I'm gonna stay with Fluency because I'm I'm convinced that it it does make a difference. Um, for the last 30 years or so, I've been associated with uh the Kent State University Reading Clinic. Uh it's part actually part of our master's degree program where our uh master's students in reading have to take a practicum. Uh so what we do is over a summer, uh we line these uh uh graduate students with uh four or five uh uh struggling readers. We get them from the local community and they work with the children um in these small groups uh for about an hour and a half every day over the course of five or six weeks. What we have found is that when we look at these kids, and most of them are children who have either finished first grade or all the way up through fifth grade. And what we find is fluency is a huge issue. Many of these kids uh they're able to decode words, uh, but not well. You know, they uh they they they sound them out with the well, you if if you were to hear them read uh uh orally, it would be slow, very laborious reading, monotone. They certainly weren't getting much joy and satisfaction or even comprehension. So over the years, what we developed was a what we call a core lesson. It's the fluency development lesson, is actually the official term for that. And the idea of this uh lesson is for children to experience success every single day in reading. What we do is we give kids a text. It's usually a short piece, maybe a poem or a song or maybe a segment of a story they've been reading. And in a in a matter of about 20 minutes, 25 minutes or so, the teacher reads the text to the children a couple times, modeling fluent reading. Then they read it together, uh, children and teacher, uh, again, two or three times, and then eventually the children work on their own or with a partner and they continue to practice another two or three times. Now you get about nine or ten readings out of this one text, so there's your repeated readings. But what happens is we give the kids a reason for doing this, and that's a performance. After the children have mastered that text, read it several times through, and really can read it reasonably well, then we have them perform. We often bring in parents sitting outside in the hallway. The children go out and perform that text for their uh mom or dad or some other parent who might be out there who gives them a hug and tell them what a great job they did. We follow that up with a little bit of word study from words that are in that text. But in about 20, 25 minutes, we get some really intensive uh uh fluency practice with these children and done on a daily basis. What we're finding is that these kids are developing confidence, fluency, and of course, I call fluency the bridge to uh comprehension. We see overall reading uh improvement, uh uh uh overall improvement in reading really uh uh begin to accelerate. Uh and so we've been at this for quite a while, and uh the the uh the progress we see is is quite remarkable.

SPEAKER_01 8:08

Wow, that's amazing and leads me to want to ask all kinds of questions, which we'll get to, but I think before we go there, let's let's just talk about what is fluency and and why is it important to profession reading.

SPEAKER_00 8:22

Yeah, that's and the the reason that's a great question because it is misunderstood, and I think we'll talk about that later. But here's the way I see fluency. It's uh I see uh at one end of the reading curriculum, we have word study. You have vocabulary, you have word decoding, you have phonemic awareness, and the other end, of course, is the goal of reading, which is comprehension. Fluency fits right in the middle. It's what I call the bridge uh from phonics and word study to comprehension. How is it a bridge? Well, it's made up of two separate distinct competencies, and this is what kind of makes it a little more difficult to understand. One of those competencies is what we call automaticity in word recognition. It's the ability of for children or readers uh to read words automatically, effortlessly. Uh like you and I when we read, uh, we don't hardly ever have to stop and sound out a word. Those words are we encounter sight words. And what that means then is that we can uh devote our attention away from the word decoding task of reading uh to more the comprehension task. Uh there. So I often say that the goal of phonics instruction is to get students not to read, not to do phonics. Um like you and I, we are automatic readers. And that's what we found in our reading clinic that we have kids who are accurate, but they're not automatic. But that's only part of it. We have this other part called prosody, or the better term I guess would be expression. This is actually the link. Uh automaticity is the link from word study to fluency, and then prosody is the link from fluency to comprehension. Um, if I think about somebody who's a fluent speaker or fluent reader, it's not somebody who reads fast or speaks fast. It's somebody who uses their voice to make meaning. They get loud, they get soft, they get fast, they get slow, they have dramatic pauses, they phrase the text appropriately. And what they're actually doing when they do this, whether it's reading or speaking, is they're creating meaning. They're making that link. In order to read something with good expression, you have to have understanding of what the text is that you're reading. So there's that link there. And and so those are the two things that constitute fluency. And sometimes I think what happens is one's one of these gets over-emphasized over the other. Uh, and uh what we get is perhaps a little bit of an imbalanced or misunderstood fluency program.

SPEAKER_01 10:49

Yeah. Well, let's talk a little bit about that because every time I hear you speak about fluency, you talk about problems, about what I call fluency awareness on the part of educators. One, that it's traditionally been ignored, fluency has in reading programs. I think you made reference to that all the way back to Allington's first article. Um, but then also if or when it is embraced, people really misunderstand it. Can you talk more about those things?

SPEAKER_00 11:18

Yeah, for sure. Um yeah, uh, Dick Allington's piece was a real uh eye-opener for many of us in the field. 1983, it's hard to believe you're talking close to 40 years ago. Fluency, the neglected goal of the reading program, I believe was the title of it. And what he said was that uh we know fluent reading. All you got to do is listen to children or disfluent reading, listen to children read for half a minute, and you can tell whether or not they're you know they're fluent readers. But what he said was we rarely do anything about it back in the 40 years ago uh or or so. Uh and and so he developed that first awareness of that. Now, the problem is, of course, I think, is these two components of fluency. Uh it maybe we should have just just gotten rid of the word fluency and talked about automaticity and porosity to begin with, but uh because it has those two subcompetencies, it becomes a bit more of a challenge, I guess, for teachers and others to really understand. And I can understand that. And that's part of it. That's part of it. And then the other part is that we often associate fluency with oral reading. Uh, you know, you talk about how do you know if kids are fluent reader or not? You listen to them read. Well, they're reading orally. Uh, in many of our classrooms, most of them, I think we would say that the goal of reading instruction is not necessarily proficiency in oral reading, but silent reading. Uh, there. So again, that associated with the oral reading becomes a bit of a uh uh a problem uh for under why why should I teach fluency if I'm interested in silent reading? What we realize though is the way you read orally reflects the way you read silently. Many, in fact, most of us would say when we read silently, we hear ourselves read uh that voice within us, that internal voice here. So that associated with oral reading, and then there's this idea of fast reading. Many of our listeners out there probably are familiar with Dibbles and Ames Webb. That's a way of assessing automaticity and word recognition. You have children read for a minute, and you count the number of words they read correctly in that minute's time. Now, I gotta admit, that's that's not a bad measure of automaticity. The research on this uh really indicates that's a high correlation between that and comprehension. The problem comes when we flip this assessment and make it a method of instruction, where uh uh well-meaning teachers, they you know, they get out the stopwatch and they work with their children for 10 or 15 minutes every day. And what they uh try to get the kids to do is read faster than the day before. And what happens is the kids do read faster, but is there any improvement in reading? No, no, because that's their goal of reading. I still remember a couple years ago we had a couple children in our reading clinic, and we were testing them. They're second graders, I believe, and the teacher gave them a text to read, and both of them looked up at the teacher uh and said, Am I supposed to read this as fast as I can? And you know, I I I think it came from you know all that emphasis on on uh making kids read fast. I want kids to become fast readers, just like you and I. We're all reasonably fast. Yeah, but how did we get that way? It wasn't through speed reading or or stopwatch reading, it was through just lots and lots and lots of practice, and you become automatic, and the speed is then reflected in that automaticity.

SPEAKER_01 14:37

Can I so those can I say can I say something and and back to you and see if this this it sort of makes sense? So, what I'm hearing you say is that word recognition, when you can recognize words, highly correlated then to reading speed, and reading speed is important to comprehension, but what we're doing is we're focusing not on the word recognition recognition and automaticity, but our instruction is focusing on reading speed. Right and reading speed is not the way to solve that piece.

SPEAKER_00 15:08

Right, yeah, that's a good way of putting it. Uh sometimes I say uh uh how do I say it? Uh speed is the consequence of automaticity. Automaticity is not the consequence of speed.

SPEAKER_01 15:20

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 15:21

So uh we work we work on automaticity in in authentic ways, and the speed's just going to come along like it does for most of us as adult readers, professional readers.

SPEAKER_01 15:30

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That that sort of relationship between word recognition and fluency. So didn't mean to interrupt you because I know there's another key element uh of fluency too that we need to talk about.

SPEAKER_00 15:42

Yeah, prosody. Um again, as I said, we often think prosody is often associated with oral reading, and you know, our goal of instruction is silent reading for the most part. Uh, but again, that that we have that internal voice that we listen to. Uh and and how do you teach prosody? Uh, you know, if you look into a lot of our uh in uh methods books that we use with teachers or programs in uh you know curricular programs, you don't see a lot of emphasis on on you know reading with good expression. And so it it begins to something that begins to fall by this wayside. I remember back in the day when I was a kid, we had something called recitation, where you would take something like a speech from American history and you would learn to recite it almost to the point of memorization. In fact, I think that's part of the problem there also. Uh we we read something, you know, working on our expressive reading, uh, uh to the point where we we could recite it by memory. And we're not really interested in having kids memorize text, but what happens is that again becomes kind of thrown in as a roadblock, you know. Oh, we don't want kids to memorize text, of course not, but we do want them to practice the text uh because that's the only way you can get to the point where you can you know read a text you know with good expression. Um this uh talk I'm giving right now with you, this uh conversation, uh you sent me some of the questions in advance. So what did I do the hour or two before I rehearsed? I looked them over so that when I hopefully when I am sharing with you, I'm not you know kind of stumbling over myself like I normally do. I've uh kind of done that rehearsal and uh now hopefully a little bit more fluent than if I had not done the rehearsal.

SPEAKER_01 17:24

Yeah, it's a couple things that um sort of turn a light bulb on for me. The one thing is that when you think about prosody or you're reading a paragraph, it the goal isn't to go as fast as you can either, right? Because the meaning is derived from the pauses or the emphasis you put on.

SPEAKER_00 17:43

Yeah, yeah, that's that's a great point. Have you ever tried reading something fast and with expression at the same time? It's like two opposing things. Uh you can't you can't do it. Uh and uh and similarly, if you have those children who are not automatic readers, they read in that word-by-word manner. They're putting so much emphasis on just trying to get the next word read uh accurately that you know they're uh they're not paying attention at all as if they're reading in an appropriate phrase or with good expression or emphasis or pausing, you know, it's just trying to get from one word to the next, and of course, a not very satisfying uh reading performance uh as a result.

SPEAKER_01 18:24

Yeah, yeah. And then the other um as it relates to the reading performance or you know, being able to um to perform these texts that you're practicing, the link between speaking and listening, right? It's just amazing. Uh never thought about that before, that um that expressive part is really related to those speaking and listening standards.

SPEAKER_00 18:49

Exactly. And it's it's it's great that those were put into the Common Course standards. And yeah, you know, how how do you become a fluent speaker? Uh, you know, you you rehearse, uh you develop those same skills that are involved in oral reading. And and similarly with listening, you know, in our in our reading clinic, our children, you know, perform poetry and readers' theater scripts and songs. Uh, the students and the adults who are listening, you know, one of the things we remind them to be is a good listener, to listen attentively, to make eye contact uh with your uh with the performers so that they know that you're following along with them. So these are skills that you know, again, sometimes get put uh pushed by the wayside, but that you know, when you think of the how we need them in in in adult life, you know, there's something that uh we simply can't ignore.

SPEAKER_01 19:38

Yeah, interesting how integrated all of, you know, in terms of common core standards, how integrated all these things are in terms of be, you know, developing as both proficient readers and writers.

SPEAKER_00 19:49

Right, right.

SPEAKER_01 19:50

Yeah. So most of our listeners are are familiar with the National Reading Panel report, which really helped us understand important elements of reading instruction, and there's been a lot of media attention recently on foundational skills, including the importance of teaching phonemic awareness and phonics, but fluency has gotten lost a little bit in this conversation. Why do you think that is?

SPEAKER_00 20:14

For fluency. Uh yeah. Um, yeah, if if many of the listeners have been following uh some of the works that have been coming out, Emily Hanford uh has been producing some reports on reading, and what what her report is uh focused on for the large most part is you know that we're not teaching phonics appropriately or with great enough uh with uh great enough explicitness and and systematicity. Uh and I don't disagree with that. I think phonics is absolutely key, but what I think some of these uh uh reporters are missing is that only gets us so far. Uh teaching kids to to read accurately and know what the words mean is great, but we need to reach that point of automaticity. As I said earlier, the goal of phonics instructions to get kids not to use it. Uh there. So what happens is, you know, I think with all the emphasis on phonics, phonics, phonics, you know, we're losing sight of well, let's take got to take that next step uh to getting kids to fluency. And then of course the next step after that is comprehension.

SPEAKER_01 21:21

Right. And you've been talking about this for a while. I think it was in what 2010, 2012, maybe, you wrote this article called Why Reading Fluency Should Be Hot. But you're still trying to make that case. Tell me more about that.

SPEAKER_00 21:36

Yeah, well, you know, what's interesting is that article came as a result of uh the uh International Literacy Association. Back then it was the International Reading Association, every year would do this, what's hot in reading? And they would ask 40, 50 experts around the country with the hot topics, and fluency was on you know on the list of topics. And every single year uh they would these experts would say it's it's not hot. Not only that, they said it shouldn't be hot. When you dug a little bit deeper, the reason for that was because you know they're making reference to this idea of speed reading and and those things that aren't all that important when it comes to fluency. But so that kind of got me a little upset. So I said, here's why fluency should be hot. And basically what I what I covered in that article was that you know, it's much the same that we talked about here. Uh, that it is that bridge to comprehension, that it's more than just reading fast, it's reading with expression and joy. Uh, and it can be done in ways that are very authentic and engaging for the kids themselves. Um, people have read it, and I've gotten some good response to that, but it's still a struggle here. We still have it. A uh, you know, this lack of emphasis. As I mentioned, I uh with uh the emphasis on phonics. I wrote to some of these people who have been writing about phonics. They say, you're missing, you know, you're you're missing that built one critical piece, fluency. And and they say, well, not really, or you know, that'll come later on its own. And I say, no, it doesn't for many kids. You have to do that. Uh you have to have that fluency emphasis. I uh with some graduate students just recently, this past semester, we did a survey of teachers around the country, and basically we asked them, uh, what are some of the hot topics? Uh not that not the hot topics, what I asked was, what we asked was how much time should be devoted to various aspects of reading instruction, comprehension, word study, phonics, vocabulary, fluency. And again, we had the same results. We had these teachers saying, uh, yeah, you a significant amount of time should be devoted to phonics and word study 30 minutes a day. Yeah, a significant amount of time should be devoted to comprehension, anywhere from 45 minutes to maybe up to an hour. But when it came to fluency, that was the one that got neglected again. It I think the but if I'm not mistaken, I think we that we what we found was that teachers are saying uh 10-15 minutes per day. And you know, that's more than zero, but it's uh you know, it's it's I think I think Tim Shanahan, uh, when he was uh the uh uh the uh leader of reading in the Chicago public schools recommended that 30 minutes per day to be devoted to fluency, and and he found that the the the results were remarkable in terms of the improvement of the students there.

SPEAKER_01 24:27

Yeah. Well it we've talked a little bit about the the role of practice to gain fluency. So this idea that word recognition and practice and that actually is what helps us gain the speed part of fluency. Um we talked a little bit about you know prosody and like know like knowing the meaning, you know, that also helps us with that um with that fluency. Um but what about when you think about our really very early readers, like those kids that are in kindergarten and first grade who are sort of just learning phonics? How do we pay attention to fluency there and develop that in parallel?

SPEAKER_00 25:02

Well, uh again, um I often go back to the uh stages of reading by Jean Shaw, one of the great names in reading, and she created this little uh um not little, but uh outline of of how we uh move our way through literacy. And what she said was that uh in grades kindergarten or first grade, it's more of the emphasis should be on phonics and word recognition. In grades two and three, then we move more into fluency. There's a lot, I don't necessarily disagree with that, but what we have actually found is that we can be bring fluency even into the kindergarten and first grade classroom. How find those texts that uh that are that are meant to be performed right out loud and have kids practice them and then eventually perform them, rehearse them, I would say, instead of uh practice them. Uh poetry, songs, readers' theater scripts, these are things that uh uh uh you know are easy to learn. The rhythm, the rhyme, the repetition in a poem or a rhyme, I think they're very accessible for kids. And it doesn't take much practice for them to reach the point where they can read them uh independently. We actually have done some research with this. I worked with a colleague of mine, Bruce Stevenson, a uh psychologist down in Columbus, Ohio. He actually taught parents to do this with their first graders. And especially the struggling readers, those kids who were the most at risk for failure in reading, or at least uh have difficulty, these were the kids who made remarkable progress in as little as three months' time, with their parents sitting side by side, where a parent would read a poem or a nursery rhyme every day to the child a couple times, then they would read it together. Eventually the child would have it to the point where they essentially had it memorized, but they could then read it uh on their own, and then they did some word study. More recently, uh, I was involved in a study at one of our local uh charter schools here in Cleveland and uh very urban school. Lots of children you would suspect are are at risk for difficulty. Uh what the teachers did was they implemented our fluency development lesson I described a little bit earlier, where it's a daily poem, and the teacher would basically try to get children to the point where they could read it successfully. Teacher would read it, then they would read it together, and the kids would practice on their own, eventually perform it. Uh, the study went from mid-October to mid-December. So, what is that? Uh two months or so, ten weeks? Yeah. Okay. What we found was these children made three times the progress uh in overall reading achievement uh than compared to children who were in similar classrooms, spent the same amount of time in reading instruction, but did not have this fluency intervention. Three times the progress. Wow. Uh much more, it was much, you know, we were even surprised by those results. But again, that's what happens when you can get kids to the point where they, you know, they take the focus off the words and can put it more on the meaning and find satisfaction then in the text of their reading.

SPEAKER_01 28:00

Yeah, and you know, I hear you say phonics, it's important. Um, explicit systematics phonics instruction is important, but it sounds like you're also saying that there is an element of fluency instruction that can also be explicit as well, and that we shouldn't, oh, what do I want to, we we shouldn't give one privilege over the other, that both of these are really important to developing reading proficiency.

SPEAKER_00 28:25

Exactly. Uh I I think Tim Shanahan went back and said, you know, equal amounts of time should be devoted to phonics and word study and and and to fluency at the same time. You mentioned expliciteness and in fluency, and if if I may, I I'd like to talk about uh some of the aspects of of good fluency instruction. If I may.

SPEAKER_01 28:45

That'd be great. Yes, please.

SPEAKER_00 28:46

Uh basically it it there's a very limited number of things we have to keep uh in mind. I think the first thing is developing in students an awareness of what is fluent reading and what better way of doing that by reading to kids. So, you know, I one of the things we talk about is when your teacher or parent reads to their children, make sure that you know you you use your enthusiasm, bring in that that uh voice uh and and make the characters come alive when you read to kids. And then uh talk with your children uh about uh you know how that reading by the teacher or parent made the text you know all the more engaging. You know, what did you think when I sped up here but slowed down here? Or I had this dramatic pause, and children begin to notice that, yeah, that really helped my understanding and my satisfaction with that reading. Now, modeling fluent reading or reading to kids is great, but that's not the kids reading themselves. So the other then the other components are these. One is what we call assisted reading. That's where children read something and they hear it read to them at the same time. Somebody who's a more fluent reader could be a parent, another uh a teacher, uh, could be another student. Uh, but when they're reading together, I'm not saying I read a line and then you read a line, but we read simultaneously. That child is hearing that fluent rendering of the text by his or her partner at the same time they're making uh they're making uh they're making their own best effort to read a text. That's what Carol Chomsky did in her study that I mentioned earlier on. Now, assisted reading can take a variety of forms. It could be reading with a partner, it could be choral reading with a group, it could be reading and listening to a uh pre recorded version of the text. We're seeing more and more of that uh happening. And and all of these have been found to be really quite successful in improving reading. We talk about practice, and uh one of the most common forms of practice is what we call wide reading, where children you know read a text one day and the next Next day they read another text, and for most kids, you know, who are average to above average readers, you know, that's a great way of developing fluency. But we need to match that with what we call repeated reading or deep reading, uh, where kids read something multiple times through. Uh uh there and um again, so that we want them to reach that point uh where they can read a text just as well as a proficient reader. Uh, and for some kids that's three readings, four readings, five readings, you know. Uh the the problem in uh with the repeated readings is to give kids a real reason to do that, and that's where performance comes in. If children know they're gonna eventually perform that poem or be part of that reader's theater performance, they're going to want to rehearse because of course they want to do a good job when they when they make their grand performance at the end of the day or at the end of the week here. So keeping those things in mind, finding texts that are meant to be performed and giving kids the chance to perform it. So modeling fluent reading, assisted reading, wide reading, deep reading, and then there's uh another one I we call phrasing. You know, if you think about somebody who's not a fluent reader, it's somebody who reads in that word-by-word manner. Uh that's getting the words right accurately, but if you think about it, you know, we want kids to read in phrases. You know, prepositions like of and the and moun markers like the, they really have no meaning if they're stand by themselves. They have to be integrated into a phrase. So teaching children children to chunk or phrase a text is part of that as well. So these are for me, these are the basic uh building blocks, if you will, of fluency. Uh, and then of course, what we try to do is okay, what happens if you can put all those things together? Uh, then you get synergy, something that's greater than the sum of the parts. And that's where uh our fluency development lesson kicks in. You know, we're working with kids who struggle, and um, you know, they need that intensive uh practice. So putting modeling, assisted reading uh in the form of choral reading, practice with a partner, uh, continued rehearsal, and then eventually eventual performance, you know, that all these things are working together uh uh in combination to build fluency and done on a regular basis can be uh can really accelerate kids' progress, as I mentioned, that study that we just finished up in there in uh uh in Cleveland. Uh I did another study a couple years ago with a teacher in from outside of Toledo, Ohio. Um she's she was a fourth grade teacher, and she worked that's fluency development lesson with her uh uh six uh struggling readers, the ones that we worried about most who were significantly behind in their reading. And again, did that same lesson on a daily basis with these children. And again, in about uh a third of a year, it was about three months' time, these kids made over a year's progress in reading on average. Yeah. And again, it wasn't just reading fast. That happened, of course, but more importantly, when they did a measure of their comprehension, uh their overall reading achievement, we saw those gains there as well.

SPEAKER_01 33:42

Amazing.

SPEAKER_00 33:43

Fluency is the bridge, and we can't ignore it.

SPEAKER_01 33:46

Well, I know to make a segue here, you've put uh all of this together in this book called The Mega Book of Fluency. I have it sitting here on my desk right in front of me, and I'm telling our listeners, which we'll link our listeners in the show notes to the book, but it really is a mega book of fluency. So tell me a little bit about how this came to be. Um and yeah, and what uh what people are taking away from this.

SPEAKER_00 34:10

Okay. Um isn't that a great title, mega book? Uh well, it actually goes back, the story of the book goes back to about four or five years ago. I was um making a presentation at the Arizona Reading Association, the state reading convention there. And, you know, I talked about fluency, the neglected all the reading program. And uh what I often reference is my a book that preceded that one. It's called The Fluent Reader. Uh and The Fluent Reader is more of a uh, I would say a slightly more scholarly approach to fluency. We talked about the research and so on. But a teacher came up to me. She was a fifth, she is, uh, a fifth-grade teacher out of uh in Arizona, near Phoenix, I believe. Her name is Melissa Cheeseman Smith, and she said, you know, I'm I got this idea. Maybe you you present some really neat ideas in your presentation, Tim, but how about if we actually put them into a book, you know, actually create lessons that teachers could put into practice? And I said, sure. You know, I'm I I come at it from the more professor side, and she comes at it from the more in-the-trenches side. And so we put our heads together and we made a collection of lessons uh that actually can be immediately uh uh uh implemented in classrooms uh and can be models for further instruction by the teachers. We have things like activities with songs and poems, readers' theater scripts, but other activities that uh tap into phrasing with the with children, and many of them are fun and engaging. I love reading, going on Amazon and reading the comments that uh teachers have made there who have purchased the book, uh, finding out uh this really can be a guide for their own fluency instruction, uh, that 15 or so minutes for their whole class to get them uh in into uh higher levels of fluency. I might mention that one of the things we found out not long ago was that uh the megabook of fluency uh won the Teacher's Choice Award for this year, 2019. So we're really proud of that. And you of course when you get an endorsement uh from teachers, people who are, you know, like I said, in the trenches, you know you're really uh you're really into something. So we're really proud of that book and really glad to see it getting into the hands of teachers and uh people who do professional development around the country. Uh yourself, thanks for thanks for getting the book, and I I hope you find it uh useful.

SPEAKER_01 36:27

Yeah, what I love about it is you're right, it takes some time to talk about what fluency is and giving, you know, giving some context to it, but the entire rest of the mega book is all about things teachers can pick up and implement alongside things that they're already doing in their classroom. So super helpful. Thank you. Um so I really appreciate your time sharing your expertise with our listeners. Um, and as we wrap up, I'd like for you to just share with us what do you think is the one thing that we should take away or we want our listeners to really think about as it relates to fluency.

SPEAKER_00 37:07

Well, uh great topic. I could maybe list 10, but uh you're putting me down. Uh one of the things I often talk about is is the art of teaching reading, how we focused on the science of teaching reading. We also know that uh to be a great teacher you have to be an artist as well. And so um what I might say is finding ways to be artful in teaching in teaching fluency, it's not getting out that stopwatch and having kids read fast. What we need to do is find authentic ways for children to engage in repeated readings and to engage in reading a text with good expression. And that's where, you know, again, I'm gonna go back on repeating myself, but having kids perform poetry and readers' theater scripts, even some things like um famous speeches from American history. Uh, you know, that used to be something that was a big part of uh reading instruction back in the day, but we kind of put that off to the side. But learning to read these with good expression, that's the art of teaching, uh, to make it something that is authentic, something we would do as adults if we were asked to be in a uh in a play or to sing a song or perform a poem. So finding making fluency an integral part of that of your instructional day, but also finding ways to make an aut an authentic part of the day itself.

SPEAKER_01 38:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:23

So that that that right now that's my big takeaway, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 38:26

Great. And for our listeners, we will link this in show notes, but tell tell them other ways they can connect with you and your work outside of this mega book of fluency.

SPEAKER_00 38:37

Okay, thanks, Susan. Yeah, I'll always uh enjoy the opportunity to plug myself here. Uh for first of all, my email address, I'll give it to you, and I'm sure you're gonna put it down. It's uh t R A S I N S K. So my first initial plus Rosinski without the I at the end at Kit K-E-N-T dot edu. So if anybody has questions or thoughts or insights, want to argue a point, I'm there. I I try to do my best to answer uh emails, uh and so, and I will do so respectfully. Um, but also uh something that's easy to get to is uh my my website. It's uh Tim Razinski, T-I-M-R-A-S-I-N-S-K-I.com. Um two things in particular that I would like to draw your attention to there is one is a blog. I if you go to the tab across the top, it says blog. I do a monthly blog uh in which I either discuss something of interest or oftentimes what I do is a lesson, uh, either with fluency or with word study, some of those foundational skills. Many of the listeners might be uh familiar with uh the daily word letters that I that I've been writing over the last several years. It's a word study activity, a kind of game. And uh I have them in book form, but occasionally what I try to do is uh do one and I'll put it right on my blog. Uh uh often I try to tap it into something that is uh seasonal. Uh so just re uh recently I did something, I believe, with uh Halloween that's coming up, perhaps. Um so you can find some lessons there under the blog. And then if you click on my website uh uh resources, uh I place there a lot of my uh uh articles that I've written over the years. You can find them there. I think the that what's hot, why fluency should be hot, I think that I that's posted there. And also other things. I put readers' theater scripts that I have written. Uh I've I put song books that you can download for free, even a nursery rhyme book that uh uh I can be printed off and you can share with your uh your your students and and and their parents. So that that's stuff that I'd love to share. One last thing, well, over the last year or so I've got into Twitter, and my Twitter feed is uh at Tim Razinski1. Uh and and the reason why I mention that is whenever I do a blog, um I'll probably usually alert my uh my audience uh to that via Twitter. Uh so uh it's a good way of carrying I found it's a great way of carrying on a uh conversation with a whole bunch of people at the same time.

SPEAKER_01 41:15

That's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 41:16

So those things, my email address, my website, and my Twitter feed.

SPEAKER_01 41:19

Sounds great. Well, thanks so much. And again, we'll link our listeners to that in the show notes. Uh appreciate your time so much, Tim. Thanks.

SPEAKER_00 41:27

Oh, my pleasure. It's always a pleasure talking to you, and uh thanks for all the good work you guys are doing.

SPEAKER_01 41:33

We're so grateful to our amazing guests today, and to all of you making a difference in the lives of students every single day. Be sure to check the show notes for resource links from today's podcast, and we want to hear your stories and successes. Follow us on Facebook at Science of Reading the Community, or send an email to SORMatters at Amplify.com. Tell us what guests you think we should book, or tell us about the research that really excites you. And be sure to hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app so you don't miss an episode. Until next time, I'm Susan Lambert from Amplify Education.